If you want to light up, don’t do it at 1418 North Lake Shore. Owners at the 28-unit Gold Coast high-rise recently banned cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and all other smokable stuff from its common areas and residences, making it the state’s first smoke-free condo building.
According to a press release about the ban, the resale value of a unit in a smoke-free building typically is higher than in a building that allows smoking. Bans can also lower the cost of living in a building by reducing cleaning and painting costs and lowering the risk of fire.
The ban also “complies with the Environmental Tobacco Smoke Control,” which is a pre-requisite for LEED certification. Whether that means 1418 is pursuing certification itself is anyone’s guess — the release doesn’t say, so this could be mere trivia for all I know — but it’ll be interesting to see if other high-rises follow suit to meet LEED requirements. And if so, will a few respond by promoting themselves as smoker-friendly havens?
Just two of the tower’s full-floor, three-bedroom condos are for sale:
- Unit #3, listed by Pamela Sage of Baird & Warner, is priced at $1.44 million, with monthly assessments of $2,350 and 2008 taxes of $16,176, and has been on the market for a little over six weeks.
- Unit #27, listed by Joan Lieb of Prudential Rubloff, has been on the market since May 2007, and has seen only one price change in that time, dropping from $2.49 million to $2.2 million last December. Assessments are $2,664 a month, and taxes are $20,977.
Two similar homes sold in the building for $1.37 million and $1.4 million earlier this year.
The problem with smoke-friendly buildings is that they could become havens for smoker buyers only. Future resale value would probably be affected as very few smokers would even want to live or invite guests to a building known for smokers.
“making it the state’s first smoke-free condo building.” Nope, a small condo in Hyde Park went smoke free a few years ago, and from what I recall, has already rescinded the ban since it was hard to enforce- policing private property is, well, fraught, with difficulties. It also hurt their resales since it gave the impression of very nosy neighbors.
LEED is really for new construction or renovation – simply banning smoking without other work wouldn’t be nearly enough to qualify for LEED (spoken without knowledge of whether or not they are doing “energy improvements” or the like).
So did they ban meth and pot as well? Enquiring mind wants to know….
USGBC does have a LEED for Existing Buildings program that “addresses whole-building cleaning and maintenance issues (including chemical use), recycling programs, exterior maintenance programs, and systems upgrades,” so it’s possible that the condo association is pursuing something along those lines, or at least keeping track of the credits they could be earning if they made a bigger push for it down the road. The smoking ban is just one of the prerequisites on a much longer checklist of pre-reqs and credits — it doesn’t look like the ban alone earns any points toward certification. (At least 40 of the checklist items are required for LEED Basic).
As far as non-tobacco substances, the press release did say “any other smoking.”
Would that include rib smokers, Joe?
There’s a delicious bit of irony here.
The developer of the building, Herb Rosenthal of Dunbar Builders, rabidly hated NIMBYs, busy-bodies and officious condo boards.
Herb lived in the building for several years after it was completed, primarily (I think) so he could get in the face of and irritate the influential neighbors on either side who’d stalled his proposals for the site for about a decade.
Herb was bounced as a client of the law firm I worked at for washing a $50,000 bribe to an alderman through the law firm’s accounts. He was a thoroughgoing rogue who hated any restraints on personal liberty.
Herb was also responsible for the first condos in Illinois and was the impetus for the drafting and passage of the Illinois Condominium Property Act.